Education and skills for development in South Africa: Reflections on the accelerated and shared growth initiative for South Africa

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International Journal of Educational Development 27 (2007) 421–434 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedudev

Education and skills for development in South Africa: Reflections on the accelerated and shared growth initiative for South Africa S. McGratha,, Salim Akoojeeb a

University of Nottingham, UK Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, South Africa

b

Abstract In July 2005, President Mbeki announced the launch of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA), a new development strategy designed to help the South African state meet the ANC’s 2004 election pledges, namely:

   

halve unemployment; halve poverty; accelerate employment equity; and improve broad-based black economic empowerment.

AsgiSA outlines a very different development path from the current orthodoxy of the Millennium Development Goals and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers in spite of the common commitment to halving poverty. This difference in approach encompasses the education and skills sector, where post-basic provision is given considerable attention. This paper seeks to explore why South Africa has taken this different approach, especially in education and skills development. It examines what the current evidence tells us about the strategy’s likely success. Finally, it briefly considers the implications this case might have for the dominant model of African education and development. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: South Africa; Education; Economic development; Skills development

1. Introduction Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 115 951 4508;

fax: +44 115 951 4397. E-mail address: [email protected] (S. McGrath). 0738-0593/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2006.07.009

In July 2005, President Mbeki announced the launch of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA), a new development strategy designed to help the South African

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state meet the ANC’s 2004 election pledges, namely, to:

   

halve unemployment; halve poverty; accelerate employment equity; and improve broad-based black economic empowerment (ANC, 2004).

As we shall argue, AsgiSA outlines a very different development path from the current orthodoxy of the Millennium Development Goals and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers in spite of the common commitment to halving poverty. This difference in approach encompasses the education and skills sector, where post-basic provision is given considerable attention. This paper seeks to explore why South Africa has taken this different approach, especially in education and skills development. It examines what the current evidence tells us about the strategy’s likely success. Finally, it briefly considers the implications this case might have for the dominant model of African education and development. The paper arises out of a longer study by the South African Human Sciences Research Council, which was commissioned as part of multi-country, DFID-funded study of post-basic education and training and poverty reduction in Africa and South Asia (Palmer et al., 2006). For that study, interviews were conducted with ministers and officials from a range of government departments and agencies, and a wide range of economic and skills policy documents were analysed. However, this paper is also informed by our wider professional work, including participation in provincial and national research support to growth and development and human resources development strategies, and, in the case of one author, participation in policy development as a member of government committees and working groups. Such involvement clearly informs our analysis, both in terms of the range of insights it afforded us and in terms of a degree of partial responsibility and sympathy for certain policy decisions. The commissioned study was completed in early 2005. However, with the launch of AsgiSA a short while later, we have decided to update our analysis to take account of this major new policy initiative.

2. The background to AsgiSA: the state of development in South Africa South African development policies are still profoundly shaped by the twin legacies of colonialism and Apartheid and their shaping of a model of uneven and skewed development. The country has achieved relative success on a number of key indicators. GDP growth averaged 3% between 1994 and 2003 and has moved to 4–5% since then. Inflation has fallen to 3.3% from a high of over 20% in 1986. Foreign direct investment and consumer confidence are booming; and the rand has doubled in value since the late 1990s. Nonetheless, the historical legacy has resulted in a range of structural problems and a poor performance on poverty, inequality and unemployment that belies the country’s wealth and level of development according to the indicators above.

2.1. Poverty Across a variety of quantitative definitions and methodologies, it is accepted that between 45% and 55% of the South African population are poor and between 20% and 25% are in extreme poverty (Everatt, 2003; Gelb, 2003; Landman, 2003; van der Berg and Louw, 2003; Bhorat et al., 2004; Meth and Dias, 2004; UNDP, 2004). To put this another way: between 18 and 24 million people are in poverty, including between 8 and 10 million in extreme poverty. Unsurprisingly, this poverty has pronounced spatial, racial and gender dimensions (Woolard and Leibbrandt, 2001; Everatt, 2003; Gelb, 2003). The incidence of poverty also manifests itself at the nutritional level. One in 10 Africans are malnourished; one in four African children are stunted (Woolard, 2002; Everatt, 2003, p. 77).1 Moreover, Roberts (2004) notes that hunger appears to be increasing across a range of measures. Equally, it is possible to think of poverty in terms of access to basic services. Whilst access to these is improving, a significant poverty gap still remains (Budlender, 2003). 1

We will use the official South African racial classifications where ‘‘black’’ is the aggregate term for Africans, Indians and coloureds. Like many other commentators, we acknowledge the state’s rationale for using these categories whilst remaining concerned about their essentialising nature and potential impact on building a non-racial society.

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2.2. Inequality Although South Africa has a serious poverty problem, it is not particularly remarkable in African terms. The country’s level of inequality, however, is amongst the worst in the world, with the Gini coefficient still lying between 0.58 and 0.68 (Gelb, 2003; Landman, 2003; Bhorat and Cassim, 2004; Roberts, 2004).

2.3. Unemployment There is a strong relationship between poverty, inequality and unemployment in South Africa. Measured by household income, 83% of households in the bottom fifth have no people in employment. Looked at from another angle, 38% of African households in 1999 contained no employed people—up from 32% in 1996 (Everatt, 2003, p.78). As Roberts (2004, p. 488) notes, this means that 3.1 million households are workerless. Unemployment is not a new problem in South Africa, although its incidence peaked early in the current decade. Unofficial estimates were 12% in 1970 and 21% in 1980. The current unemployment rate (September 2005) is 26.7% on the narrow definition, or about 10 points higher on the broad definition, which includes those who are ‘‘not actively seeking work’’ and are characterised as ‘‘discouraged’’ workers. There are strong grounds for seeing the broad definition as the more valid as many potential workers are likely to be ‘‘discouraged’’ in the context of mass unemployment, particularly where the costs of job searching are significant, as is the case for many rural unemployed. Whatever the definition chosen, the level of unemployment in South Africa is very serious. Part of the explanation for high unemployment in South Africa is that economic growth has not been high enough over the last 30 years. Whereas growth had averaged more than 4.5% per annum between 1945 and the early 1970s; the period from the mid1970s to the beginning of the 1990s saw growth average only about 1.5% per annum. This and the recent average of 3% have not been good enough to generate sufficient employment. Between 1995 and 2002 about 1.6 million net new jobs were created in the South African labour market, an average growth rate of 2.1% per annum (including informal work). However, over the same period, more than five million people entered the

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labour market (Bhorat, 2003; Landman, 2003; Bhorat and Cassim, 2004). 2.4. Unemployment and education The incidence of unemployment is uneven according to education, age and race. About 58% of those formally employed have at least matriculation level education (12 years of schooling), as compared with only 38% in the total working-age population. About 22% of the formally employed have postmatric education, whilst this is the case for only 8% of the total working-age population (Landman, 2003, p. 8). It appears that even matric is no longer of much value in the labour market. McCord and Bhorat estimate that only 36% of matriculants can find employment; whilst another 19% go on to further or higher education (McCord and Bhorat, 2003; Kraak, 2003a). About 56% of the unemployed are aged 30 years or younger; whilst 15–24 year olds comprise 30% of the total unemployed. Only 29% of new African labour market entrants between 1995 and 1999 were able to find work, compared to 50% of Indians, 70% of coloureds and 75% of whites (McCord and Bhorat, 2003). 2.5. Other development indicators The Human Development Index 2005 shows that South Africa has fallen to 120th place, its rating of 0.684 being down from 0.741 in 1995 (www.undp. org). Whilst South Africa is a strong performer in relative terms in the area of education, the HIV/ AIDS pandemic is clearly having a major deleterious effect on life expectancy. Crucially, the HDI indicates that South Africa is doing less well than it should be for a country of its income level. The GDP-HDI rank of 68 is amongst the worst in the world. HIV prevalence in the South African population is estimated at 11% (4.8 million people), and is far higher amongst women (13%) than men (8%). The intersection of poverty and HIV/AIDS is indicated by the finding that spatially the highest prevalence is for people living in informal settlements (Shisana et al., 2005). The disease is expected to have a massive effect on future national development. Whilst it is estimated that the infection rate peaked in 1998 (Budlender, 2003), the peak death rate is only likely to be felt by about 2010. The loss of skills of those who die, and

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the increase in the number of orphans left in the pandemic’s wake, suggest a massive social and economic impact. 2.6. The state of skills The evolution of attitudes towards skill of labour market structures and of the economy in just over a century of South African industrialisation by 1994 resulted in a seriously disfunctional skills development system. Three major problems faced the incoming state in this area. First, skill had been profoundly racialised and gendered. Black (especially female) South Africans had been denied access to skills development or had received no certification or recognition for their real levels of skills and knowledge learned on the job. Moreover, provider institutions and delivery systems were fragmented and disfunctional. Second, the absence of consensus and cooperation around skills development was not simply about issues of access. The state had abandoned much of its responsibility for building skills and the business community seemed incapable of developing a strategic position. The possibility for tripartitism was almost non-existent in one of the most conflictual industrial relations systems in the world. Third, South Africa’s Apartheid-driven industrial development path had led to an intense polarisation of skill between high skill and low skill elements; with a serious underdevelopment of the intermediate skill segment, which is seen as essential to successful industrialisation and competitiveness internationally (Kraak, 2003a; McGrath, 2004). 2.7. Development policy 1994– 2005 In popular accounts of South Africa’s development policy trajectory since 1994 (e.g., Marais, 1998; Bond, 2000), it is a commonplace that the initial grassroots development vision of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was abandoned in favour of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) Programme as the ANC lost its initial radical impulses. However, as some recent commentators have noted, neither was the RDP so unambiguously progressive nor GEAR so simplistically pernicious as these accounts suggest (e.g., Daniel et al., 2004; Gelb, 2004). Nonetheless, the process of reviewing the first 10 years of South African democracy in 2003–2004

does seem to have encouraged the state to take a more developmental stance, whilst acknowledging the globalised context in which this had to take place (Daniel et al., 2004; Gelb, 2004; Southall, 2006a). In this new approach, there was an acceptance that fiscal stability had to be built upon in order to deliver both economic growth and greater social inclusion, and that the state would have to take a stronger leadership role in delivery (Daniel et al., 2004; Gelb, 2004; Southall, 2006a). This position developed over a period of time but was given popular attention first by the ANC Manifesto for the 2004 elections, with its four key pledges noted above. After victory at these elections, in his May 2004 State of the Nation Address (Mbeki, 2004), the reelected President outlined a three-pronged approach to addressing these challenges:

  

encouraging the growth and development of the first (modern and globalised) economy, increasing its possibility to create jobs; implementing a programme to address the challenges of the second (subsistence) economy; and building a social security net to meet the objective of poverty alleviation.

In pursuit of these objectives, the Government then published a Programme of Action (Republic of South Africa, 2004). Progress against the Programme was to be posted onto the Government website every 2 months as a sign of the President’s own personal commitment that the Government should be held publicly accountable for its performance against the national development vision. The Programme is organised in line with the five clusters that have been identified for intra-governmental collaboration:

    

economic, investment and employment; governance and administration; international relations, peace and security; justice, crime prevention and security; and social.

The Programme comprises 36 themes and over 100 sub-themes with designated lead and partner departments and agencies. Barely a year after the Programme was announced, AsgiSA was ‘‘launched under the leadership of the Deputy President’’. This is consistent

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with the thrust of the Programme of Action but focuses more particularly on the first two of the five clusters and aims in particular at overcoming the short- to medium-term barriers to the country’s larger developmental vision. 3. The accelerated and shared growth initiative for South Africa The title of the new initiative makes clear its core focus. GDP growth in the first democratic decade averaged 3% but this was still only half of the growth rate of 6% promised by GEAR. AsgiSA revises down the growth target to 5% per annum for the next decade, and divides this into a 4.5% target for the first 5 years, followed by 6% for the second five. The ‘‘shared’’ part of the initiative’s focus continues the concern of the ANC, 2004 Manifesto with making sure that this growth is reflected in reduced poverty, inequality and unemployment and improved black economic participation. AsgiSA also contains a notion of balanced growth in which South Africa diversifies away from its current reliance on the commodity sector and eliminates the second economy (see below). These objectives led to six themes being identified for AsgiSA (Republic of South Africa, 2006): 1. Infrastructure programmes—this includes a commitment to increase public sector investment to 8% of GDP from a low of 4%. Much of this will be invested by public enterprises, particularly on electricity and transport. In addition, the 2010 World Cup will be a core focus of the infrastructural development programme. 2. Sector investment (or industrial) strategies— focusing particularly on business process outsourcing and tourism, with biofuels intended as a third focal area over time. In all of these sectors, there will be a focus on broad-based black economic empowerment and small business development. 3. Skills and education initiatives—this will be discussed in detail below. 4. Second economy interventions—this includes interventions in the first economy, for instance, through improved access to procurement, linked to the infrastructure development programmes noted above, that would then have positive impacts for smaller, black-owned enterprises in the second economy. There will also be a focus on promoting economic opportunities for women

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and youth. The regulatory environment for small businesses will also be addressed. The Expanded Public Works Programme will be further developed. Attention will be given to enhancing and realising the value of poor people’s assets. 5. Macro-economic issues—this area has a particular concern with exchange rate volatility and with maintaining low inflation. The strategy also includes better budgetary management. 6. Public administration issues—as part of its move towards a more interventionist position, the state has shown an increasing concern with the capacity of departments and agencies at all levels to deliver on economic and social objectives. As part of the focus is on a skills deficit, we will consider that in more detail below.

4. Skills policy 4.1. AsgiSA and skills The summary document for AsgiSA argued the following about the centrality of education and training to growth: For both the public infrastructure and the private investment programmes [AsgiSA priorities 1 and 2], the single greatest impediment is shortage of skills—including professional skills such as engineers and scientists; managers such as financial, personnel and project managers; and skilled technical employees such as artisans and IT technicians. (Republic of South Africa, 2006, p. 9) This challenge is supposed to be met through a range of initiatives:

    

achieving higher levels of literacy and numeracy in the early grades of school; doubling maths and science high school graduates by 2008; upgrading career guidance; upgrading public further education and training (FET) colleges; and expanding adult basic education and training (ABET) delivery.

In addition, the government had already launched the Second National Skills Development Strategy in March 2005 (Department of Labour, 2005a).

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4.2. The joint initiative for priority skills acquisition (JIPSA) The AsgiSA plan also introduced a new structure to drive this process: JIPSA. Again led by the Deputy President, JIPSA brings together ministers, business leaders, trade unionists and educationalists to identify urgent skills needs and quick and effective solutions (Republic of South Africa, 2006). In her speech at the launch of JIPSA, Deputy President Mlambo-Ngcuka identified the following as the key areas of skills shortage to be targeted:

      

high level engineering and planning skills for infrastructure development; city, urban and regional planning and engineering skills for local and provincial governments; artisans and technicians, especially for infrastructure development; management and planning skills in the social sectors and for local government; teacher training for maths, science and English; skills for the priority sectors, especially in project management, general management and finance; and skills for local economic development (MlamboNgcuka, 2006)

JIPSA is intended to build on more than a decade of policy and institutional development in education and training. Key elements of this include:









Curriculum reform throughout the education system, centred on a shift to an outcomes-based model and the introduction of a National Qualifications Framework. Higher education reorganisation featuring a ‘‘new institutional landscape’’ characterised by mergers and upgrading of technikons to become universities of science and technology, and also a stronger quality assurance system, managed by the Council on Higher Education. Further education and training transformation, also featuring institutional mergers but, more recently, focusing on curriculum reform and a recapitalisation programme. A new skills development system, driven by two National Skills Development Strategies (Department of Labour, 2001, 2005a) and featuring a new vocational qualification (the learnership), a levy-grant mechanism and new sector education and training authorities (SETAs).





Adult basic education and training expansion, with new qualifications and delivery mechanisms and a commitment to the recognition of prior learning. An overarching human resources development strategy (Department of Education and Department of Labour, 2001) designed to coordinate the work of the two line departments and other national and provincial departments.

5. Why has the present understanding of education and development emerged? 5.1. The rationale for a strategy of accelerated and shared growth The combination of accelerated and shared growth as the heart of South Africa’s development strategy is easy to understand as an attempt to balance the twin traditions of the RDP and GEAR, of poverty reduction and growth. The state clearly articulates an analysis in which only faster growth can possibly meet the social and economic challenges but in which this growth must also be made more equitable in the distribution of its benefits. The shift to AsgiSA is, in part, one of packaging and does not commit any new funds. Many elements of the strategy can be found within both the RDP and GEAR, or were foreshadowed by the Programme of Action. Nonetheless, AsgiSA can be read as part of a broader shift in emphasis within ANC policy that is significant. Part of the rationale for this shift undoubtedly comes from an acceptance that policies have not been working well enough. The government’s Towards a Ten Years Review (Republic of South Africa, 2003) provided a space for such an analysis to emerge officially. Its overall message was generally positive about the performance of the state but provided a stark warning about the challenge ahead: The advances made in the first decade by far supersede the weaknesses. Yet, if all indicators were to continue along the same trajectory, especially in respect of the dynamic of economic inclusion and exclusion, we could soon reach a point where the negatives start to overwhelm the positives. This could precipitate a vicious cycle of decline in all spheres. Required are both focus

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and decisiveness on the part of government, the will to weigh trade-offs and make choices, as well as strategies to inspire all of society to proceed along a new trail. If decisive action is taken on a number of focused areas, the confluence of possibilities is such that the country would enter a road of faster economic growth and job creation, faster and more efficient provision of quality services, increased social cohesion and reduction of the paradigm of exclusion prevalent among sections of society. (Republic of South Africa, 2003, p. 102). This picture is reinforced by a sense that the relative success of GEAR in getting the macroeconomic fundamentals right had not had the expected social and microeconomic impacts. As noted earlier in this paper, relatively high growth rates have not resulted in significant improvements in poverty, inequality or unemployment. The above quotation also demonstrates that the government had interpreted failure as being due in large part to its own lack of leadership. For development to be achieved, it would require the state to be stronger both in capacity and in setting the direction for the economy. This is linked to an analysis in Towards a Ten Years Review that success has generally been greatest in areas where the state has had most control over the implementation of policy. Lurking behind this is a view that other actors, for instance, the private sector, have not always fully shared the government’s concerns about certain areas of policy, such as employment equity. Southall (2006a) argues that this determination to take the lead in development has encouraged the South African state to look to the development states experience of East Asia. He also notes that this approach has served the further purpose of allowing disparate elements of the Tripartite Alliance (ANC, Congress of South African Trade Unions and South African Communist Party) to agree on a national development strategy in a way that was impossible under GEAR. This reflects the very varied understandings that exist about the relative roles of market and state in the East Asian development experience. The rationale for the specific elements of AsgiSA is largely relatively easy to understand also. The focus on infrastructural development is driven by two notions. First, that this is an area that the state can play a crucial role in driving development and,

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second, that poor infrastructure is a major constraint on trade and investment. This is largely wellgrounded in evidence from existing and potential importers and exporters. In addition, the successful World Cup 2010 bid has provided urgency to infrastructural upgrading. Similarly, a focus on sectoral policy has been an element of South African thinking about development, even at the height of GEAR. Indeed, the state can point to significant successes in this area, such as in the automotive sector (McGrath, 2005). Tourism is already a major sector and the events of 2010 again provide a rationale here. Business process outsourcing has been identified since the 2003 State of the Nation Address (Mbeki, 2003) as a key sector for the future. This is based on South Africa’s levels of English fluency and financial and telecommunications infrastructure, but it is evident that there are many other competitors for all or some of this business. Biofuels is not a sector in which South Africa, as yet, has shown any real competitive advantage. However, the upward trend in oil prices and the imperative of addressing global warming have encouraged the state to see this as a strategically vital sector. We will deal with public sector administration and education and skills in more detail shortly, but it is logical to see both of these as crucial priority areas given the legacy of unequal and inadequate education from the past and the role that skills and knowledge can be expected to play in meeting the aspirations for the future. Macroeconomic issues remain pertinent for South Africa in spite of outstanding performance on many indicators in the recent past. Most importantly, as the AsgiSA document notes, exchange rate fluctuations have had a major impact on the economy in the past decade. The notion of the second economy is perhaps the area in which AsgiSA is seen to be on the weakest ground. There has been widespread concern that the concept is too weakly theorised. Whilst there is clearly a need for policy to find some way to talk about and address the major disparities in the country, Devey et al. (2006) outline the ways in which the second economy notion obscures and distorts the potentially more important notion of the informal economy and its relations to the formal economy. They point to the persistent failings of policies for the informal economy since 1994 (see also McGrath et al., 2006) and argue that the dangers of conflation of the concepts of informal

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and second suggest that the misspecification of policies for small, micro and medium enterprises is likely to worsen. It is also possible to discern within the language of AsgiSA an older ANC tendency of wishing the informal economy out of existence (King and McGrath, 2002). Thus, the AsgiSA summary document talks of ‘‘eliminating the second economy’’ (Republic of South Africa, 2006, p. 11). Without a clearer notion of what the second economy is supposed to mean and its relationship to both informality and poverty reduction, it is difficult to see this as other than a naive rhetorical flourish.

5.2. The rationale for focusing on education and skills AsgiSA and JIPSA continue the emphasis of the President in State of the Nation Addresses since 2004 in identifying education and skills as one of the most central elements in South Africa’s national development strategy. This is entirely in keeping with international trends in thinking about the impact of globalisation and the knowledge economy, which have led policymakers to see education and skills as crucial to competitiveness. The rationale for this is essentially two-fold. First, globalisation reduces the scope for state intervention in many traditional areas of social and economic policy (e.g., interest rate setting), leaving education as one of the few key areas of accepted state intervention. Second, the discourse of the knowledge economy heightens older arguments about the centrality of human capital investment to individual and national economic performance. This conjunction has encouraged governments internationally to see education and skills as a core tool for increasing economic competitiveness and promoting social inclusion (Crouch et al., 1999; Brown et al., 2001; Akoojee et al., 2005). The South African state has clearly accepted this logic. In doing so, it is also drawing on the powerful legacy of multiple domestic discourses. From within the ANC’s political tradition, there is a strong drive towards educational expansion, expressed in the words of the Freedom Charter: ‘‘The doors of learning and culture shall be opened’’. Moreover, this drive for expansion is intertwined with a concern to overcome the massive educational inequalities generated by colonialism and Apartheid. In the face of such inequalities, the interna-

tional tendency towards seeing education as central to advancement has been intensified. The current discourse of the developmental importance of education and skills also derives significantly from a Congress of South African Trade Unions tradition. As McGrath and Badroodien (2006) argue, elements within the trade union movement identified skills as central to a shift towards a post-Apartheid industrial system based on higher skills, wages and productivity. Influenced heavily by the Australian industrial transformation of the 1980s, these elements helped drive South Africa towards its current HRD system, particularly as key union officials moved into senior posts in the Department of Labour after 1994. Finally, this drive to higher skills found resonance with the position of elements of business leadership, who also saw higher skills as central to a new industrial system. This vanguard, with its focus on high skills and work reorganisation, was partially supported by a wider employer concern with skills shortages, a theme that has ebbed and flowed for at least 40 years in South African public debates (Kraak, 2003b, 2004; McGrath, 2004). Taken together, this set of discourses, both international and domestic, have brought education and skills to the centre of the dominant development approach in South Africa. They have also helped shape education and skills discourse in terms of which levels and segments of the overall sector are seen as most important. In a context where most learners are receiving the legislative commitment to 10 years schooling (including 1 years pre-school), popular concerns about education are inevitably focused on getting access to quality further and higher education. This reinforces the thrust of the international debate on high skills for the globalised knowledge economy. It also finds strong resonance in the industrial debates between capital and labour. However, these debates also highlight the importance of workplace skills development across skills levels, including ABET. 6. What are the prospects for the South African approach to education for development? 6.1. Prospects for AsgiSA There are several reasons for caution about the likely impact of AsgiSA and South Africa’s broader shift towards a form of development state. We will now briefly outline some of these.

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First, there are specific questions about the design of AsgiSA itself. It is evident from the wide range of press coverage of the initiative in South Africa that, in spite of widespread support for the concept of accelerated and shared growth, there are serious concerns from both capital and labour that the policy does not really address many of the fundamental problems. For capital, there remain worries that the ANC has shied away from its concerns with labour market inflexibility in the face of trade union opposition, and that the regulatory framework is still too burdensome. For labour, the initiative goes too far in the very direction of labour market flexibility. A powerful critique has also been advanced by Blade Nzimande, Secretary-General of the South African Communist Party. He questions whether accelerated growth and shared growth can be achieved simultaneously given the industrial and economic realities under which the policy will be implemented (see below for more on this). He highlights three potential weaknesses in particular: 1. infrastructural development based in mega-projects is not likely to lead to meeting the needs of the poor and may simply generate a series of ‘‘white elephants’’; 2. HIV/AIDS is entirely absent from the strategy yet is undoubtedly one of the greatest constraints on future development as well as one of the most pressing social and humanitarian challenges facing the country presently; and 3. the second economy concept (as noted above) does nothing to develop strategies that can build a single economy and remains ignorant of the complex interlinkages between informal and formal work and between microenterprises and welfare payments (Nzimande, 2006) Nzimande’s concerns about the way that AsgiSA will interact with the existing structure of the South African economy reinforces analyses made in the HSRC’s State of the Nation 2005–2006 volume. These argue that the current global patterns of capital flows and the growing dominance of an Anglo-Saxon model of industrial structure are inimical to key elements of the South African development vision (Buhlungu and Webster, 2006; Southall, 2006b). These processes reduce the state’s capacity to intervene in the workplace, particularly as a series of major corporations have moved their

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stock market listings and headquarters offshore. They encourage South Africa’s existing tendencies towards excessively concentrated corporate ownership, dominated by the large financial houses. In this context, black economic empowerment is likely to remain largely a matter of a small elite who are in reality heavily indebted to the major financial houses. Employment equity is also unlikely to see radical advances across the board, and will probably remain concentrated in certain segments of the professional classes (Moleke, 2006). These concerns also link to Southall’s wider interrogation of the shift towards a development state model (Southall, 2006a). Whilst he notes the political advantages such a notion brings, he is concerned that tensions in specific understandings of the notion cannot be easily managed. Moreover, he notes the hugely different context from that of East Asia in which South Africa is making such a move. In so doing, he restates the importance that state capacity and bureaucratic cultures had in the successful development states and questions the plausibility of South Africa growing these quickly. Finally, the State of the Nation also suggests caution about government ambitions based on its record to date. Hemson and O’Donovan (2006) note that many targets have been met by the South African state in the past decade. However, they also point to the large numbers that have not been achieved. More worryingly, they highlight a tendency within the state to redefine or drop problematic targets and to focus on inputs at the expense of outputs or impacts. From other work by the HSRC, there is also a need for caution about the likely contribution of education and skills to the development vision. We will address this in the next section. 6.2. Prospects for JIPSA and the ‘‘skills revolution’’ In her speech at the launch of JIPSA, Deputy President Mlambo-Ngcuka said: ‘‘If we fail in the human resource and skills development sphere, AsgiSA fails.’’ (Mlambo-Ngcuka, 2006). Behind the inevitable rhetoric, it is evident that skills development is a central element of the current South African development strategy. In assessing the likelihood of success, we will consider evidence of recent performance of education and skills, focusing particularly on further education and training, skills development and public sector training initiatives, and consider whether this

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suggests that the country is well-positioned to meet the AsgiSA vision. For the FET college sector, there is evidence of growth in learner numbers and some signs of greater diversity in terms of age and curriculum delivery. The system is also broadly performing in terms of gender and race equity within learner enrolments, but the data is shockingly silent on the issue of disability in spite of the prioritisation of this dimension within the National Skills Development Strategy (McGrath, 2006). There is also evidence of on-going college development, including in areas linked to better interaction with colleges’ external environments (HSRC, 2006a–c). Nonetheless, there are continuing and major challenges for the sector. It is clear that the merger process is still far from complete and that the sector is still very fragile. Many colleges remain too small, whilst others are showing clear growing pains from their rapid expansions. Provincial disparities in funding, provision and quality remain worryingly great. Institutional quality and relevance are still not established. In particular, curriculum diversification has not yet happened. Indeed, although the Department of Education has published its plans for recurricularisation, the proposals remain untested by the market and the relationships between the Department of Education, the Department of Labour and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) remain unsettled 5 years after a review of SAQA was launched. At present, colleges are largely hamstrung in making curricular decisions, and are particularly unsure of how best to balance their financial imperatives and their educational goals. Staffing is clearly not yet adequately addressed and continues to be a major constraint on improved performance (HSRC, 2006a–c). The desire to grow the sector even faster whilst effecting a thorough transformation across a range of elements points to the real danger that any success might not be sustainable. Official data on the implementation of the National Skills Development Strategy (Department of Labour, 2005b) and evidence from commissioned studies (McGrath et al., 2006; Paterson and du Toit, 2006; Smith et al., 2006) suggest that the South African enterprise training system has met a range of targets in the period since the new skills system was developed between 1998 and 2001. There is evidence of continued growth in training activity

and this has been reflected in the form of wider participation. Significantly, much of this growth appears to be occurring in medium and small formal and informal enterprises. There has been a rapid acceleration of learnership delivery and completion, with very high levels of satisfaction with the programmes and their ‘‘brand image’’. However, there are serious problems still apparent in the system. Performance against equity targets has been very uneven, with particular underachievement of the disability targets. There are huge sectoral variations in performance across most indicators of training activity, which cannot simply be explained by the internal dynamics of individual sectors. This is linked to continued weaknesses in the operations of certain SETAs, manifested in high levels of enterprise dissatisfaction and confusion regarding the information provided by SETAs about the levy-grant procedures, and support to members. Most seriously, those firms in greatest need of support generally do not seem to be getting it. In spite of a joint HRD Strategy, the past 5 years have not seen meaningful progress in a consolidated national vision for education and skills development and the two line departments have been largely unable to agree on the correct balance between education and training in the skills area, an issue that is the core of the SAQA impasse. Public service training struggled to receive serious attention prior to the development state shift. Paterson (2006) outlines how government departments were exempt from the skills levy and how many of them ignored the state’s commitment that they should match private sector expenditures on skills training. He also highlights the weakness of the relevant SETAs and the ways that the financial and performance management systems of the public sector have undervalued skills issues. From this brief and partial review of post-basic education and training, three particular challenges stand out: 1. how to build robust institutions (including finances and staffing) that can deliver efficiently on education and skills, including public vocational providers and sectoral bodies; 2. how to ensure that provision is relevant to both economic and social needs rather than a reflection of the institutional interests of particular departments; and

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3. how to build the skills and culture of the public service rapidly whilst also delivering services. Of course, it can be argued that it is these kinds of weaknesses that JIPSA and AsgiSA are committed to addressing. However, the point of this section is to highlight the very serious obstacles that need to be overcome in order for these strategies to succeed. It is unclear whether the concentration of power over development policy in the hands of the Deputy President will be sufficient to overcome such obstacles. If it is true that failure in the human resource and skills development sphere will mean that AsgiSA fails, then the prospects are far from clear. 7. The possible international implications of the AsgiSA experiment Those from the rest of Africa are often rightly tired of hearing about what they should learn from South Africa. Nonetheless, we suggest that there are implications from the South African process for the rest of the region, albeit ones that should be thought of as provoking national debates rather than as providing technical blueprints to be followed. The cautious position we have taken regarding South Africa’s emerging approach to education and development could be read as reinforcing the argument for the current orthodoxy of the propoor/basic education approach. However, it is clear that such an approach would be an irrelevance for South Africa. Given its existing economic structure and educational provision, it is inevitable that South Africa will need to focus its attentions on post-basic education and training and on growth with equity. For other African countries, there will be an increasing need also to focus on these challenges, particularly if pro-poor policies, including those for basic education, do largely get achieved. Indeed, Palmer et al. (2006) stress the importance of wellfunctioning post-basic provision for the success of the universalisation of basic education. As the rates of return to primary education continue to fall with growing output of graduates, so it becomes increasingly vital that students can successfully progress to post-basic programmes and to decent work. Equally, an effective basic education system must build on higher level skills for its teaching and administration. The case of South Africa may also point towards the advantages of seeing the Millennium Develop-

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ment Goals in a somewhat different light than has hitherto been prevalent. Rather than treating all the MDGs as equally important in all national contexts, it may be more useful to give primacy to MDG1 (halving poverty), as South Africa has. The other MDGs, in this view, would then be tempered by the need to find nationally appropriate solutions to reaching MDG1 through promoting pro-poor actions in health, gender, education and environmental sustainability. Moreover, the South African case reinforces the need to see pro-poor development as consistent with strategies for growth, including through industrial development. There is a growing acceptance in international policy documents that successful development requires the building of capacity and enabling environments (e.g., World Bank, 2002; Commission for Africa, 2005). In a sense, this takes us back to a more nuanced reading of some of the early texts used to justify the basic education shift at the beginning of the 1990s, as Palmer et al. (2006) have usefully done recently . If we return to Lockheed, Jamison and Lau’s much-cited work on farmer education and productivity, for instance, we find that the simple correlation between limited basic education and significant improvement in productivity was carefully qualified by the phrase ‘‘under modernising conditions’’ (Lockheed et al., 1980, p. 56). These conditions included: new crop varieties, innovative planting methods, erosion control, and the availability of capital inputs such as insecticides, fertilizers, and tractors or machines. Some other indicators of [a modern] environment were market-orientated production and exposure to extension services (Lockheed et al., 1980, pp. 55–56). It is evident that post-basic education and training has an important role to play in stimulating such an enabling environment (Palmer et al., 2006). In the South African development vision it is apparent that the state must play a leading role in creating such an environment. Although the South African state clearly has far more capacity already in place than most other countries in the region, this vision does apply to other states and, indeed, is attractive to many of them. However, it is apparent that any shift towards an African development state model will entail considerable conflicts and complexities, not least regarding how growth and equity can be simultaneously pursued and achieved. The issue of state

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capacity is likely to be central to this and this implies one major role for education and training. However, the East Asian experience and South African debate remind us that a successful state bureaucracy requires an ethos even more than capacity development. Moreover, such an ethos will require the right political and economic context in which to flourish. Thus, the enabling environment is both a partial requirement for more effective development and an outcome thereof. Notwithstanding the complex challenges faced, there is a need for other African countries to try to respond to the emphasis on post-basic education and skills that South Africa has developed. Intermediate and high level skills will be important across the region to attempts to promote international competitiveness whatever the specificities of national context. Moreover, recent accounts argue that skills development offers Africa a tool to deliver on both growth and social inclusion (Tikly, 2003; Akoojee et al., 2005). This has been a major theme of OECD social policies in recent years. However, Crouch et al. (1999) point to the difficulties that have come in practice in managing these twin imperatives. Indeed, Akoojee et al. (2005) suggest that Southern African countries have made little progress towards dealing with this tension. The South African experience suggests that this tension is difficult to overcome and points to the need to begin addressing this challenge. 8. Conclusion AsgiSA, is well-located in the national context. There are highly plausible, multiple reasons for the South African state’s decision to follow this particular development path with its stress on the centrality of post-basic education and skills and of the state’s leadership role. Without higher growth, and better economic structure and infrastructure, South Africa will not reach its stated goals for poverty and unemployment. Nonetheless, the challenge of meeting these ambitious goals will not be easy. Part of the problem here is that several of the key constraints are far easier to identify than overcome. How far the South African government is correct in its analysis and planning may depend largely on how well it has read the dynamics of the global politicaleconomic system and its own ability to position itself therein. Whatever the outcome, there are

strong reasons for other African countries and development cooperation agencies to follow the South African experiment closely as a valuable new perspective on how to support the internationally accepted goal of halving poverty through interventions in education and training.

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